Umberto Eco Quotes

I translated Beatles songs for my English class.

They say that immigrants don’t speak English. So? Who cares. Even the Irish learned English after a while.

It is asked of me that I give my first speech in this house in a language [English] other than my mother tongue [French.] …. Even if I knew English as intimately as I knew French, I would still give my first speech in the language of my French Canadian compatriots

If you spend your time trying to learn English, you fall behind in your course content… I know because when I came here I could not speak English. So that was the idea of Congress when we passed bi-lingual education. But that was to only go on for a short time—one and one half years. But many of the bi-lingual education programs of today go on for year after year and they are destructive because the primary objective is to learn English.

Man is multiplied by the number of languages he possesses and speaks.

Globalization has brought a proliferation of such environments, so that even monolinguals must increasingly learn to live and act multilingually.

People learn English from 'Full House.' Candace's husband, Valeri Bure, he learned to speak English watching it... 'Aw, nuts.' 'You got it, dude.'

You could imagine a language exactly like English except it doesn't have connectives like 'and' that allow you to make longer expressions. An infant learning truncated English would have no idea about this: They would just pick it up as they would standard English.

Podcasts immersed me in colloquial English and put me back in the American zeitgeist.

Plainly, children learn their language. I don't speak Swahili. And it cannot be that my language is 'an innate property of our brain.' Otherwise I would have been genetically programmed to speak (some variety of) English.

English is a really wonderful language and I urge you all to investigate it

Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?

I think of myself primarily as a reader, then also a writer, but that's more or less irrelevant. I think I'm a good reader, I'm a good reader in many languages, especially in English, since poetry came to me through the English language, initially through my father's love of Swinburn, of Tennyson, and also of Keats, Shelley and so on - not through my native tongue, not through Spanish. It came to me as a kind of spell. I didn't understand it, but I felt it.

I feel my poetry has contributed through all these languages that I needed to learn leading up to English.

No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.

It's still a mystery to me exactly how I learned the language. [But] I was 19 years old and I had very urgent things to tell girls.

On the day after 9/11, I walking through the smoke and the smells of New York. There were knots of policemen everywhere. As I went past one officer, he called out: "Hi, Magneto." That's an indication of X-Men's extraordinary reach.

A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen.

If you love language, it will love you back.

We are storytelling creatures, and as children we acquire language to tell those stories that we have inside us.

I've become obsessed with learning other languages in movies, because I was like, since I was like, but I learned how to box so why don't I just learn another language for a movie?

Learning astrology is like learning any foreign language. You already have the ideas, concepts, and experiences of your life within you; you are just learning a new language for what you are already experiencing.

Babies are born with the instinct to speak, the way spiders are born with the instinct to spin webs. You don't need to train babies to speak; they just do. But reading is different.

Obstreperous, ‘huh,” said Tad. “I see you’ve been using that Big Word of the Day calendar I got you last Christmas.” “That is irrefragable,” I told him solemnly.

No matter how much people want to pretend that they're embarrassed by it, that they don't watch it, everybody knows about it. It's truly, I believe, one of the only art forms that America has actually given to the world, besides jazz and comic books.